'This Is Illegal': US Lawmakers Slam Strikes on Yemen

 

'This Is Illegal': US Lawmakers Slam Strikes on Yemen

January 12, 2024

U.S. lawmakers said late Thursday night that the Biden administration's barrage of airstrikes in Yemen—launched in coordination with American allies but without congressional approval—was blatantly unconstitutional and dangerous, heightening the risk of a full-blown regional conflict. "This is illegal and violates Article I of the Constitution," U.S. Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) wrote on social media following the strikes.

READ THE FULL STORY

Informed Comment daily updates (01/11/2024)

 

In Blow to Democracy, British Parliament Votes to Outlaw University and Council Boycotts of Israel amid Gaza Genocide Belfast (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – On January 10, the UK parliament passed the third and final reading of the anti-boycott bill proposed by pro-Israel Conservative hawk Michael Gove, who serves as Secretary of State for Leveling Up, Housing and Communities and Minister for Governmental Relations. The House of Lords still needs to approve […]

Global warming on course for Destabilizing 5.2° F. (2.9° C) Rise, UN report warns Catherine Early ( China Dialogue ) – Countries must make far greater efforts to implement their climate strategies this decade to stand a chance of keeping global temperature rise within 1.5C (2.7F) of the pre-industrial average. Continued delays will only increase the world’s reliance on uncertain carbon dioxide removal technologies (CDR), according to the UN […]

The Int’l Court of Justice Case is a Chance to hold Israel and the US to Account for Genocide ( Code Pink) – On January 11th, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague is holding its first hearing in South Africa’s case against Israel under the Genocide Convention. The first provisional measure South Africa has asked of the court is to order an immediate end to this carnage, which has already killed […]

Old posts you may have missed

California’s Great Battery Revolution Allows Closure of Peaker Gas Plants and move to 100% Wind, Solar, Water In Earth’s Hottest Year on Record, an Unprecedented 28 Billion-dollar Disasters struck US Sunsetting the War on Terror — Or Not: The Stubborn Legacy of America’s Response to 9/11 How Israel’s “Send Palestinians to Congo” plan Evokes British Colonial Plans to send Jews to Uganda Nowhere to Run – The world’s Refugees say, ‘Gimme Shelter’ Muslims and Jews: Remembering Jewish School Days in Pre-Revolutionary Tehran Poll: Americans have no Idea what Biden Means when he says he is a Zionist, or What Israel’s Ideology is

Elections calendar from Ballotpedia

 YOU CAN SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE

https://ballotpedia.org/Elections_calendar

NATIONAL DISGRACE: It’s been 22 years since the Guantánamo prison opened. Men are still held there

RON DESANTIS SERVED IN GUANTANAMO & IGNORED THE TORTURE 

It’s been 22 years since the Guantánamo prison opened. Men are still held there

Pardiss Kebriaei

During his captivity, my client Sharqawi Al Hajj has lost both parents and gone through his 30s and most of his 40s. He wonders what future he has left

Thu 11 Jan 2024 06.01 EST

Sharqawi Al Hajj is a man detained at the US military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. I have been his lawyer for many years. This week marks 22 years since the prison was opened, and Sharqawi’s 20th year inside. He is one of 30 men still detained there, down from nearly 800 ever held. This trajectory is because Guantánamo, though not singular among prisons in its harsh treatment and arbitrary detention, was at least for a time very overt in its extremeness, and what could be seen more plainly than usual caused a reaction.

There are public records and images of an earlier period that people who are old enough remember. A news article from 2002, reporting on the first planeload of detainees arriving, sticks with me. Men chained to their seats for 8,000 miles were led off the plane because they wore goggles covered with black tape; some fell to the ground. A government report from 2008 described interrogations during those years, things like a man being found immobile on the floor of an interview room next to a pile of his own hair.

These accounts and many that followed led to a movement over the years. By the time of Barack Obama’s presidency, seven years after Guantánamo opened and 15 years ago looking back, the United States’ position was that the prison should be closed – within one year. The commander who set up the prison wrote an op-ed saying it should never have been opened. There was an international outcry, with the UN and the European parliament and countries around the world issuing condemnations.

So there are reasons for the emptying of this prison from hundreds to a few remaining, and for the long-standing position of the United States and the international community that it should be closed for good. The 30 men left are in a degraded, vacant complex. Guantánamo is a horrible relic of the past, with the 30 inside still bearing its legacy.

The steps needed for true closure are obvious, yet stuck. Like the majority of those still there, Sharqawi is cleared for release from Guantanamo. In 2021 a government board took the recommendations of prison authorities with other intelligence and determined that his continuing detention was no longer necessary for national security. His imprisonment drags on for other reasons, political and otherwise, all of which are beside the only point: that his detention today is unjustified, and this after two decades at Guantanamo.

In the time that Sharqawi has been held, his father passed, then his mother. He has gone through his 30s and most of his 40s. He was brutally treated before, which is lodged in him. That brutality, along with the deprivations that go with years of imprisonment, have been toxins for his body. He wonders what kind of future he has even if he is released.

I do not know what to tell him on this point, nor how to elevate his suffering to make it seen, in this time of many other extremes.

What seems most gratuitous here is that those closest to Guantánamo agree that it was a profound mistake, that most of those ever detained never should have been held at all, and that the majority of those still imprisoned after 22 years do not belong there now. In a sea of deep suffering, this is a place where there should be release.

• Pardiss Kebriaei is Mr Sharqawi Al Hajj’s lawyer and has represented men at Guantánamo since 2007. She is a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask if you would consider supporting the Guardian’s journalism as we enter one of the most consequential news cycles of our lifetimes in 2024.

From Elon Musk to the Murdochs, a small number of billionaire owners have a powerful hold on so much of the information that reaches the public about what’s happening in the world. The Guardian is different. We have no billionaire owner or shareholders to consider. Our journalism is produced to serve the public interest – not profit motives.

And we avoid the trap that befalls much US media: the tendency, born of a desire to please all sides, to engage in false equivalence in the name of neutrality. We always strive to be fair. But sometimes that means calling out the lies of powerful people and institutions – and making clear how misinformation and demagoguery can damage democracy.

From threats to election integrity, to the spiralling climate crisis, to complex foreign conflicts, our journalists contextualise, investigate and illuminate the critical stories of our time. As a global news organisation with a robust US reporting staff, we’re able to provide a fresh, outsider perspective – one so often missing in the American media bubble.

Around the world, readers can access the Guardian’s paywall-free journalism because of our unique reader-supported model. That’s because of people like you. Our readers keep us independent, beholden to no outside influence and accessible to everyone – whether they can afford to pay for news, or not. If you can, please consider supporting us just once from $1, or better yet, support us every month with a little more. Thank you.

Betsy Reed

Editor, Guardian US

‘An FBI agent described seeing a man lying nearly unconscious on the floor of a sweltering hot room, next to a pile of his own hair, which he’d been pulling out.’ Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/11/guantanamo-bay-men-prison

Informed Comment daily updates (01/10/2024)

 

California’s Great Battery Revolution Allows Closure of Peaker Gas Plants and move to 100% Wind, Solar, Water Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The renewables revolution around the world has depended primarily on wind, hydro, and solar. A fourth factor is now swiftly emerging as essential, that is, mega-battery storage. Batteries store energy when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining, to release it when those sources decline. California has so […]

In Earth’s Hottest Year on Record, an Unprecedented 28 Billion-dollar Disasters struck US By Shuang-Ye Wu, University of Dayton | – National weather analysts released their 2023 billion-dollar disasters list on Jan. 9, just as 2024 was getting off to a ferocious start. A blizzard was sweeping across across the Plains and Midwest, and the South and East faced flood risks from extreme downpours. The U.S. set an […]

Sunsetting the War on Terror — Or Not: The Stubborn Legacy of America’s Response to 9/11 ( Tomdispatch.com ) – This week marks the 22nd anniversary of the opening of the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, the infamous prison on the island of Cuba designed to hold detainees from this country’s Global War on Terror. It’s an anniversary that’s likely to go unnoticed, since these days you rarely hear about the war […]

Old posts you may have missed

How Israel’s “Send Palestinians to Congo” plan Evokes British Colonial Plans to send Jews to Uganda Nowhere to Run – The world’s Refugees say, ‘Gimme Shelter’ Muslims and Jews: Remembering Jewish School Days in Pre-Revolutionary Tehran Poll: Americans have no Idea what Biden Means when he says he is a Zionist, or What Israel’s Ideology is We can end Mass Atrocities in Gaza and Beyond CNN Admits its Policy of Submitting to Israeli Censorship ‘Has Been in Place for Years’ 1.1 mn. Children of Gaza caught in a Health Nightmare that Worsens Every Day; Clinics attacked 600 Times

POLITICO Massachusetts Playbook: How Christie’s exit changes the race

 

BY LISA KASHINSKY AND KELLY GARRITY With help from Mia McCarthy SHAKE-UP IN NEW HAMPSHIRE — Chris Christie was supposed to be headlining a fundraising lunch for the MassGOP today. Instead, he’s regrouping from the end of his presidential campaign . The former New Jersey governor launched his second White House bid in June with the near single-minded mission of taking out Donald Trump. But less than two weeks before the first-in-the-nation primary, the GOP field’s most anti-Trump candidate risked becoming his biggest enabler — a reality he acknowledged when he exited the race Wednesday. “I am going to make sure that in no way do I enable Donald Trump to ever be president of the United States again,” Christie told the few dozen people who had gathered in a wedding chapel in Windham, New Hampshire, for what some of his staunchest supporters in the room had been told was a policy speech. “And that’s more important than my own personal ambition.” Chris Christie ended his presidential bid in a likely boon to Nikki Haley in New Hampshire. | Robert F. Bukaty/AP Christie ultimately caved to an intense pressure campaign from New Hampshire Republicans anxious to consolidate the anti-Trump vote around a single candidate: Nikki Haley. GOP Gov. Chris Sununu, a longtime friend of Christie’s, became his most prominent antagonist, describing Christie’s faltering campaign as “dead in the water” during a TV interview at the end of last month and saying on a radio show this week that casting a ballot for Christie would be a "wasted vote." Privately, Haley supporters were pressing those in Christie’s camp to look at the math, in some cases appealing directly to the candidate and his wife, Mary Pat, according to conversations recounted to Playbook. While Christie’s exit paves the way for anti-Trump Republicans and independents who had been torn between him and Haley to migrate her way, the former New Jersey governor isn’t actively encouraging them to do so. In fact, he continued to make the case on Wednesday — on a hot microphone and, later, to his town-hall audience — that neither Haley nor any of the other candidates still running (the ever-shrinking field includes Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy) are treating the front-running Trump with the appropriate level of villainy given the threat Christie believes he poses to the nation’s democracy. But according to a recent UNH/CNN survey , Christie’s exit alone could be a boon to Haley. Sixty-five percent of those who backed Christie in the poll said they would break for Haley if he was no longer in the race. Whether that will be enough to help Haley close the gap with Trump remains to be seen. But for those desperate to see the former president fail, it almost assuredly puts her closer to the type of upset victory on Jan. 23 that could change the trajectory of a presidential race that’s seemingly headed for a rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden. And so Christie’s campaign ends not with a victory but perhaps with some redemption for the New Jerseyan whose endorsement of Trump in 2016 helped pave his path to the White House — a decision he offered a direct-to-camera mea culpa for in the waning days of his longshot bid. GOOD THURSDAY MORNING, MASSACHUSETTS. There are 12 days left until the New Hampshire primary. TODAY — Gov. Maura Healey speaks virtually at the Massachusetts Society of CPAs annual tax conference at noon. Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll attends the grand opening of ArLab at Quincy College at 6:30 p.m. Senate President Karen Spilka is on WBUR’s “Radio Boston” at 11 a.m. Tips? Scoops? Email us: lkashinsky@politico.com and kgarrity@politico.com . DATELINE BEACON HILL ON A TIGHT BUDGET — More funding for Massachusetts’ overtaxed emergency shelter system could be “harder to support” as the state grapples with a revenue shortfall, House Speaker Ron Mariano told reporters Wednesday. “I mean, obviously, it’s a concern,” he said. “As revenues continue to bottom out and flatten, it becomes harder and harder to support some of these things.” Mariano didn’t directly weigh in on Gov. Maura Healey ’s proposal to cover remaining shelter costs for this year and expected costs for next year by draining $700 million from a surplus account that holds one-time, pandemic-era funds. But he said her move to cut the state’s budget — from which Healey is slashing $375 million to balance out poorer-than-projected tax collections — was the right call: “We have to keep that balance, no matter what the economic conditions are.” FOR YOUR RADAR — Senate President Karen Spilka is plotting another push for free community college for all. "Keep your eyes peeled" for funding in the Senate’s version of the fiscal year 2025 budget, she said on the heels of a new report that puts the annual cost of such a program at $170 million a year. — “Elon Musk goes after Gov. Maura Healey over using private homes to house homeless,” by Chris Van Buskirk, Boston Herald: “Elon Musk indirectly criticized Gov. Maura Healey’s handling of immigration in Massachusetts, saying 'now they want your homes too' in a repost of an August news story on the administration’s efforts to find more housing for homeless families.” — “ State education secretary takes to airwaves with a message: make school attendance ‘a priority,’ ” by Max Larkin, WBUR: “Nearly four years after COVID-19 first shuttered schools, students are still missing class at rates unprecedented in the past two decades. In an effort to reverse that trend, Patrick Tutwiler, the state’s education secretary, will make his television debut this week to deliver the message that ‘school is where kids belong.’” — “Massachusetts House approves bill outlawing revenge porn for second session in a row,” by Chris Van Buskirk, Boston Herald: “The bill representatives approved on 151-0 vote would make it illegal for someone to spread nude content of another person without permission even if the subject agreed to take the photos or videos in the first place. The proposal now heads to the Senate for consideration." — “‘The right next step’: Early education board votes to boost subsidy for child care providers,” by Samantha J. Gross, The Boston Globe. — “Supporters of Everett soccer stadium renew push on Beacon Hill,” by Walter Wuthmann, WBUR. YAHD SIGNS AND BUMPAH STICKAHS SAVE THE DATE — Republican state Rep. Mathew Muratore told Playbook he’s planning a “special announcement” for Jan. 23, after saying late last year that he’s considering a bid to succeed Democratic state Sen. Susan Moran , who is foregoing reelection to seek a county post. Already in the running for her seat are Democratic state Rep. Dylan Fernandes (who has the backing of Healey and Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll ) and Bourne School Committee member Kari MacRae , a Republican. FROM THE HUB — “Was last year really the least violent in Boston’s history?,” by Danny McDonald, The Boston Globe: “In a 30-minute speech highlighting the accomplishments and vision of Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration, it was an easily missed but historic superlative buried in the 15th paragraph of her remarks: Last year saw the least gun violence recorded in Boston’s history. … [Last year] featured the lowest number of shootings, both fatal and nonfatal, since the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, a police intelligence gathering operation sometimes referred to as BRIC, started keeping track of such statistics in 2005, according to police.” — “ 20 arrested following Boston State of the City address, charged with disorderly conduct, ” by Flint McColgan, Boston Herald. — “ Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen touts inflation reduction, clean energy opportunities in Boston visit, ” by Grace Zokovitch, Boston Herald. — “Boston reaches $2.4 million settlement with female police commander over gender discrimination case,” by The Associated Press. — “Boston puts housing tax incentives on ice,” by Jennifer Smith, CommonWealth Beacon. PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES — “It’s ‘Groundhog Day’ at the T when it comes to worker safety. Agency acknowledges yet another near-miss,” by Taylor Dolven, The Boston Globe: “A train came dangerously close to hitting an MBTA worker ... again. On Monday evening, a Green Line train entered a work zone where trains weren’t allowed while a worker was turning off a signal heater on the tracks near the Medford/Tufts station, the T confirmed.” DAY IN COURT — “ Dewar confirmed to state’s highest court, ” by Colin A. Young, State House News Service (paywall): “Gov. Maura Healey's first nominee to the Supreme Judicial Court was unanimously confirmed to the bench Wednesday. When Dewar is seated at the SJC, it will be the first time since December 2020 that the high court will include any justice not nominated by Gov. Charlie Baker. The Swampscott Republican filled all seven seats on the SJC during his two terms in office.” MEANWHILE IN RHODE ISLAND FROM THE GRAVE — With one day until the deadline, presidential candidates are scrambling to get on the ballot in Rhode Island. And at least one — Vivek Ramaswamy — has been accused by the state’s Board of Elections of having an "unusually high number of invalidated signatures and instances of deceased voters” submitted on his behalf, The Providence Journal’s Katherine Gregg reports . HEARD ‘ROUND THE BUBBLAH TRANSITIONS — Nick Black is now director of strategic initiatives for the Office of Climate Innovation and Resilience. —  Former MassDems Chair Gus Bickford is joining MassDOT as chief of intergovernmental affairs. HAPPY BIRTHDAY — to former GOP Senate candidate Kevin O’Connor, Ben Finkenbinder, Barry Shrage and Jonathan Sarna . Want to make an impact? POLITICO Massachusetts has a variety of solutions available for partners looking to reach and activate the most influential people in the Bay State. Have a petition you want signed? A cause you’re promoting? Seeking to increase brand awareness among this key audience? Share your message with our influential readers to foster engagement and drive action. Contact Jesse Shapiro to find out how: jshapiro@politico.com .   Follow us on Twitter Lisa Kashinsky @lisakashinsky Kelly Garrity @KellyGarrity3   Subscribe to the POLITICO Playbook family Playbook  |  Playbook PM  |  California Playbook  |  Florida Playbook  |  Illinois Playbook  |  Massachusetts Playbook  |  New Jersey Playbook  |  New York Playbook  |  Ottawa Playbook  |  Brussels Playbook  |  London Playbook View all our politics and policy newsletters FOLLOW US

POLITICO, LLC 1000 Wilson Blvd. Arlington, VA, 22209, USA